Research areas

Please notice: Justine Chambers is currently on leave.

Justine Chambers is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on ethno-national conflict, morality, identity politics, climate change and rebel governance. At DIIS, she is part of a 5 year research project exploring the climate-conflict nexus, drawing on anthropological field research and theoretical frameworks to better understand the experiences of communities affected by both climate change and conflict and the politics of natural resource management, land rights and indigenous conservation efforts in Myanmar’s ethnic borderland regions.

Current Research

Justine Chambers' research contributes to the MyClimate project by producing new empirical knowledge on how local communities respond to climate change and conflict and how state actors, civil society organizations and political movements across Myanmar and its border regions address climate change and the interlinked fields of environmental conservation, natural resource management and extraction, land use and pollution.

How do military state interventions linked to natural resources and environmental management reconfigure local access to and control over land and other natural resources in ethnic areas? Which forms of resistance emerge in response – both armed and non-armed?

How do different local actors react to military state interventions in the fields of natural resources and environmental management? Which discourses and perceptions of climate change and its urgency prevail amongst (military) state, local civil society, ERO and indigenous actors and how do these diverge or converge? How does identity – ethnic and religious - shape local adaptation and mitigation measures introduced to respond to climate change?

How do natural resource and environmental interventions and demands under the military coup shape the conflict dynamics and the prospects for future peace and democracy? By examining the linkages between these major dynamics – and how they are felt on the ground, particularly amongst ethnic and indigenous communities who have long experienced conflict– Justine Chamber’s work aims to provide a critical perspective on global climate change programming in conflict-affected states. 

Projects

Justine Chambers is a postdoc on the collaborative research project: MyCClimate: Climate Actions, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Myanmar (2021-2026), led by Helene Maria-Kyed (Senior Researcher, DIIS). Funded by the Danish Research Council for Development Research, MyCClimate is part of a collaboration with researchers from DIIS, which leads the project, the Nyan Corridor, the Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University (Thailand), and the Highland Institute in northeast India, the project will shed light on the linkages between climate change actions and conflict dynamics in Myanmar’s contested ethnic border regions.

As part of the project, Justine Chambers is a Visiting Fellow at the Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.  

Her previous work includes an in-depth examination of morality and personhood amongst Buddhist, ethnic Karen communities in conflict areas of southeast Myanmar. In 2024 Chambers published her first monograph, Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar with NUS Press. Pursuing Morality is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Myanmar’s Karen State, an area defined by the world’s longest civil conflict. Drawing on anthropological theories of morality and ethics, it adds valuable insights into the lives of conflict-affected communities in Myanmar and their understandings everyday morality on the frontiers of a Buddhist state.

Beyond academic publications, Justine Chambers is also a regular commentator in international media on Myanmar's affairs. In addition, she has also worked as a consultant, providing policy-relevant advice to Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the British Council, UNDP, UNHABITAT, WWF and other donors/NGOs on climate change programming, HLP rights and support for informal justice mechanisms in Myanmar.